


Had a Fancy

by trill_gutterbug



Category: Lawless (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 09:02:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trill_gutterbug/pseuds/trill_gutterbug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forrest is splitting firewood when he gets the idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Had a Fancy

Forrest is splitting firewood when he gets the idea.  
  
It’s near ten in the morning, and the sun isn’t up over the trees yet, frost still on the grass, but already he’s sweating. His jacket’s long gone, tossed over the woodpile, and his feet are starting to slip a bit in the mud churned up around the chopping block.  
  
On the porch, Jack is picking at his banjo, bare feet propped up on the split-rail. It had been a five-stringer when Daddy’d played it, but Jack’s popped a string and now it makes a sick sort of twanging sound whenever he strums too fast.  
  
Forrest winces every time Jack strums too fast.  
  
He rubs sweat out of his eyes with the back of one wrist, and lets the sledgehammer slide down through his fingers until the head is resting on the toe of his left boot. He looks around for Howard.  
  
“Where’s Howard?” he asks Jack.  
  
Jack glances up at him, skinny even in his bulky coat, hardly filled out at all thanks to a lean and cold winter. He’s got a whole three hairs on his chin, and he’s too fond of them by half. He strokes them now, squinting around the yard. “Dunno,” he says.  
  
Forrest picks up the wedge from the ground, pounds it deep into the scarred block with one clean hit. He leans the sledge up against the old block, older probably than Jack is, crumbling from dry rot around the edges. He peels off his shirt, balls it up and holds it against his hip. He nods to the heap of split wood. “Get this in the house,” he tells Jack.  
  
Jack says, “Uh huh,” and picks at his banjo some more.  
  
Forrest slogs out of the mud, kicks his toes against the edge of the porch to clean off his boots. “Now,” he tells Jack.  
  
“Yeah, all right,” says Jack, and gets up slowly.  
  
Forrest finds Howard crouched down by the lake, throwing rocks at the last floating skims of ice. “Got an idea,” Forrest says, pausing near the trees. He’s pretty sure Howard’s drunk still from last night.  
  
“Yeah, what’s that?”  
  
Forrest takes a minute to look around at the clouds, the cold blue light coming in between the trees and a few curls of mist that haven’t yet been burned off the lake. “Fixing cars,” he says at last.  
  
Howard throws one more stone, and then turns to look at Forrest over his shoulder. “Fixing cars,” he says.  
  
Forrest lifts his brows, agreeing.  
  
“What about fixing cars?” asks Howard.  
  
“Do it here. Make money off it.”  
  
“I see.” Howard waves his finger up toward the station. “You know how to fix cars?”  
  
Forrest shrugs. “A bit.”  
  
“But do you know enough? I sure as hell don’t.”  
  
Forrest scratches his cheek, and that makes the rest of his face itch with sweat. He scrubs at himself with his damp shirt. “I know enough.”  
  
Howard stands up slowly, hopping to ease the blood back into his legs. He sways, sets one foot back to catch himself. “Sounds like a plan to me, brother.” He smiles, lopsided, teeth sticky with chewing tobacco. “Cricket’d be thrilled to get his mitts in on that, no doubt about it.”  
  
Forrest dips his chin in agreement. “Sure’n he would.”  
  
Howard shakes his head, starts up the sloping bank toward Forrest. “That kid’s going to grow up smart, thank the Lord. Least he’ll have something going for him.”  
  
Forrest follows Howard back to the house without comment, because he knows Cricket will be smart when he’s grown into his own gangly limbs and maybe gets a couple square meals in his belly. Just in the way that he knows Jack probably won’t end up smart, but maybe will come out wily enough.  
  
Jack’s got half the wood in the house already, one armload at a time. Forrest puts his dirty shirt down on the porch and thinks about building some kind of box, put some wheels on it, so they don’t have to always be taking six trips from the shed out back every day.  
  
Howard goes right past the firewood without stopping, heads into the garage. Forrest starts to follow him, ask what Howard thinks about building the garage a little bigger for more cars, but then Jack trips down the stairs and goes flat on his ass in the mud, and Forrest has to spend a bit of time hauling him up and brushing him off and setting his clothes to rights instead.  
  
When he’s done, he’s cold again, and ends up putting a few more rounds on the block to chop through with the sharp axe. He’s still splitting when a car comes rattling into the yard, laying on the horn like there’s a fucking circus just around the bend.  
  
Howard appears out of the garage, splattered in grease and fuel, wiping his hands down on his pants. Forrest wonders what the hell he’s been doing in there, for someone who says he knows nothing about fixing cars.  
  
Forrest puts another round on the block as the car’s doors open and two girls come piling out, holding onto one another and laughing. The driver’s door opens. Bankie Spinnon gets out, hands in his pockets to ratchet his pants up out of the mud.  
  
“Forrest,” says Bankie, nodding.  
  
Forrest nods back. His eyes are stinging with sweat again, but he’d have to be bat-blind and fish-deaf not to see the girls staggering against each other, hear their voices too loud and their laughter too shrill. He doesn’t see any booze.  
  
“You need something?” asks Forrest. He swings the axe slowly, touching the blade against the chop block.  
  
Bankie nods to the pump. “Some gas. Some coffee, if you’ve got it.”  
  
“All right.” Forrest wipes a hand under his nose, gestures to Howard. “Get coffee on,” he says. Bankie’s their first customer of the day, and the pot Jack had made at six this morning is long since cold or drunk up.  
  
Howard lopes past him into the house, doing one quick and surprisingly agile spin on his heel to look at the girls more closely, grinning his half-cocked grin. The screen door slams behind him, bounces on its hinges.  
  
Bankie holds a hand open toward his passengers. “These here are Emmie Lou and Brigitte. They’re new to town.”  
  
“I can see that,” Forrest says, mostly to himself.  
  
Brigitte, her blonde hair fluffed out over her forehead and her camelhair sheath rucked up too far in back, comes toward Forrest across the mud. Her eyes rake him up and down, unfocused but hot, the pupils small.  
  
“I see they grow them well in the country,” she murmurs, and then laughs.  
  
Emmie Lou, leaning back against the car, nods her agreement. She has lipstick on her teeth when she smiles, waving one small hand like a queen.  
  
Forrest wrinkles his nose, chewing the side of his cheek. He wishes he still had his cigar from the morning.  
  
“Now, now, girls,” says Bankie, putting his hand on Brigitte’s arm, tugging her back around. “Forrest here don’t go in for that kind of thing.”  
  
Forrest grunts, because that’s true, but what does Bankie mean saying it like that?  
  
“What’d you give ‘em?” he asks.  
  
Bankie pauses, pulls Brigitte into his side. He looks at Forrest sidelong. “What do you mean?”  
  
Forrest hooks his thumb at Emmie Lou, who has started sliding down the side of Bankie’s car, mumbling toward the sky, settling her clean linen behind onto the dirty footboard. “What’d you give ‘em?” he repeats.  
  
Bankie shrugs, smiles with his brown teeth. He had used to run the old pub in town, back before the laws changed, and he’s been hopping like a flea from job to job since. No real use to him, Forrest has always thought, and seeing him now with two pretty out of town girls rubs Forrest the wrong way, sets his hairs on end. Bankie’s never been able to afford running his car around for a joyride before.  
  
“I didn’t give ‘em anything,” Bankie replies at last, shaking his head. “They gave it to themselves.”  
  
Brigitte pulls herself away from Bankie, goes to Emmie Lou. The girls engage in a brief struggle, floppy like newborn pups pulling each other’s ears. It ends with Brigitte sitting next to Emmie Lou, and both of them holding onto the sill of the car window like it’s going to float away.  
  
Forrest brings up the axe in one hand, splits his round clean in half. “And what’s that?”  
  
Bankie chuckles once, nervously. “To be honest, I’m not rightly sure. They came out of the powder room down at the Beef House like this, and haven’t said a right word since.”  
  
Forrest nods, retrieves half the round. “That when you pick 'em up?”  
  
Bankie shakes his head. “Last night.” He frowns, tips his hat back on his forehead with one finger. “Listen, Forrest, why do you care?”  
  
Forrest splits the round, sets up the other half. “I don’t,” he tells his axe.  
  
Howard bangs the screen door open. “Coffee’s ready,” he calls.  
  
Bankie gathers up the girls, cajoles them away from the car and into the station, herding them through the door when Emmie Lou tries to wander away around the porch. Howard stands aside to let them in, catches Forrest’s eye and shakes his head.  
  
Forrest chops wood for a while more, until he runs out of rounds, and then stacks up an armload to take indoors. He doesn’t know where in the hell Jack’s run off to. Probably to find Cricket, play cowboys and Indians in the woods.  
  
Howard is sitting with Bankie and the girls at the table in the corner, leaning forward on his elbows. Forrest drops his load into the wood box, takes a minute to open up the stove and push around the bed of guttering coals with the poker until he can fit in a half dozen pieces of wood. The coals flicker back to life, lick up fire. Sparks fly, cracking, and Forrest sucks air through his teeth when an ember hits his bare arm.  
  
“Hey, Forrest,” calls Howard. “This here’s your first customer. Bankie says his car’s knocking when he takes corners.”  
  
Forrest closes the stove, claps his hands together to dust off the creosote. “Tell him to stop taking corners so fast,” he says.  
  
Howard laughs, and Bankie joins in tentatively. The girls twitter.  
  
Forrest gets six eggs going in the frying pan while Howard asks Bankie questions about the knocking in his engine, what he’s been doing with his time of late, if he managed to sell his old canoe or whether Old Lady Heath cheated him out of that too, like she had with ten barrels of turnip mash two summers ago.  
  
Forrest leans on the counter, arms crossed against the chill of his cooling sweat, and watches Emmie Lou and Brigitte whisper. He notices that there are only two mugs on the table between all four of them.  
  
Bankie falls silent in the middle of telling Howard how his dog’s been running off after deer when Forrest puts two more mugs of coffee down on the table, slides them across to Emmie Lou and Brigitte.  
  
“Sober up,” he tells the girls, when they stop mumbling long enough to notice what he’s done.  
  
“We’re plenty sober,” lisps Brigitte. She puts her hand on Forrest’s wrist before he can pull it away.  
  
“Plenty enough,” Emmie Lou adds, setting her chin in her palm, looking up at Forrest under her lashes.  
  
Howard, at Forrest’s elbow, snorts and smacks his lips around a mouthful of tobacco.  
  
“Hmm,” says Forrest, and turns his wrist away from Brigitte’s dainty grip. He fixes Bankie with one narrowed eye. “See that they drink up.”  
  
“Sure,” says Bankie, uncomfortable.  
  
Forrest knows Bankie, knows that he’s a scum-eating toady, but that he wouldn’t stoop to hurting girls, and also that he wouldn’t cross Forrest even blind stinking drunk in the middle of a sunny day with a baker’s dozen posse to back him up.  
  
Still, Forrest sets his hand on Bankie’s shoulder in passing, squeezes hard enough that Bankie gasps.  
  
His eggs are near burnt when he gets back to flipping them. Jack appears, as though summoned by the threat of lunch passing without him. He sits down near Howard, backwards in an empty chair, and eyes the girls. They don’t pay him much mind. Even strung out like they are, they know he’s just a kid, and not a too bright one. Or maybe he just doesn’t have enough meat on his bones.  
  
Forrest gives Jack three of the eggs, scrambled up with a fork at the last minute, and a shaker of pepper from the cupboard.  
  
“You know,” says Bankie, twitching, watching Forrest eat, “you boys should have someone around to run the kitchen. Bet you could make a pretty penny serving sweets and a barbecue.”  
  
Forrest finishes chewing, clears his throat and swallows. “Huh,” he says, and that’s that.  
  
Later on, after Bankie’s car’s been filled up with gas, and Howard has taken a couple of liberties while handing the girls back into the bench seat, Forrest sits down on the steps outside. He watches the car rattle off into the distance, puffing clouds of exhaust. It weaves around the far corner and disappears.  
  
Jack brings him a cigar from inside and Forrest grunts his thanks. He trims the end with his pocket knife, puffs a few times to get it lit.  
  
“I’m mucking out the back of the garage,” Howard tells him, bracing one foot on the steps near Forrest’s ass. “I figure there’s enough space on the left side for you to set up something.”  
  
Forrest watches two roosters scrapping by the woodpile, leaping and kicking. He’ll have to do one of them in, or cut their spurs down. They make a godawful racket every morning, just under his window.  
  
He rolls the cigar between his teeth, chews it until his mouth is wet and tastes of sweet tobacco. “Don’t bother,” he says. “Changed my mind.”  
  
Howard chuckles. “Already, did you?”  
  
Forrest lets himself smile with the unoccupied corner of his mouth. “I don’t know enough about cars,” he says.  
  
“Right,” Howard replies, nodding. “I think you don’t want to talk to people is all, brother.”  
  
Forrest narrows his eyes at the sun blazing up over the garage, and mumbles around his cigar and doesn’t say anything else.  
  
Howard laughs and slaps his thigh, shaking his head. “I’ll go put all that shit back in the garage, then,” he says, and saunters off with his arms swinging.  
  
Forrest plants his feet wide in the mud, digs in his pockets until he finds a bit of leftover carving to occupy his hands, and smokes his cigar down until it’s nothing but a smouldering nub.  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I don't think I've EVER written gen before. O.o  
> What can I say? The inestimable Tom Hardy makes me do crazy things. <3


End file.
